Claudia Mello-Thoms received her joint PhD in 2001 from Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She has worked at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh and University of Sydney, in Australia. In 2018 she joined the prestigious Image Perception laboratory at the Department of Radiology, University of Iowa. Her research interests are visual search, medical image perception and image understanding. She seeks to understand why errors occur in the reading of medical images, being these either radiological or pathological images.